The Rise of Ransom City (34 page)

“I don’t know how they do it down in the Deltas, ma’am. I’m no aristocrat. I was raised without land or any particular kind of honor and while you were probably learning deportment or how to hunt with hounds or something I was selling Encyclopedias. But I’ve been out on the Rim for long enough to know a thing or two about honor and about guns. You should know that this won’t be my first duel.”

In my time I had done a lot of stupid things for reasons of pride, but I had only fought one previous duel. That was also over a question of pride of authorship— that time it was over who had first invented the Ransom Free-Energy process. Right was on my side and fortune favored me. My opponent had stumbled drunk into a tree and passed out. That was the way things were done on the Western Rim. I was kind of hoping that something similar might happen here.

“Not in my theater,” Mr. Quantrill said.

“Of course,” I said. “We’ll need to find some suitable location.”

“Of course,” she agreed.

“Good—well, what’s more, ma’am, out on the Rim when we do this we do it at dawn. Only murderers shoot each other by night— it wouldn’t be honorable.”

She pushed back her hair and scratched her head. It was obvious that she had not thought very hard or very carefully about her plan. That is often what happens when people get their heads all filled with honor, I have noticed.

“That’s true,” she said. “I believe you’re right.”

It was a little after midnight, and mid-summer—dawn was several hours away. I thought this might give her time to change her mind.

“Besides,” I said, “I don’t have a gun. You’re new in town, right, ma’am?— well not everyone here carries a gun all the time, you’ll find. I assume you don’t mean to shoot an unarmed man. I don’t know much about how things are done in the Deltas but—”

One of the stagehands interrupted to observe that Mr. Barnabas Busby Bosko, Wizard of the Western Rim, used two guns in his act, one of which was fake but one of which was real, and that Mr. Bosko surely would not mind if I borrowed it.

“Thank you,” Adela said.

“Yes,” I sighed. “Thank you very much.”

A small party emerged from the back of the Ormolu Theater into the warm summer night. Adela and I led the pack. Mr. Quantrill walked behind us. I think he was mostly concerned to ensure that we did not simply shoot each other on his premises and cause him trouble with the police. The Amazing Amaryllis walked beside him, sometimes leaning on his arm, wearing his coat over her frilled and sequined stage-clothes. She said that she was concerned for my safety and I think that she was, but that also she was worried about her investment, and the plans we had made and what I had promised her, the very latest science &c.

The two stagehands brought up the rear. I guess they had nothing better to do. They tried to make a wager, whispering, but I think they could not come to terms on odds. They made ungentlemanly remarks about Adela and unflattering remarks about me. They had a bottle of wine each, which they shared with the Amazing Amaryllis and Mr. Quantrill.

The sky over Swing Street was a cloak of black velvet, sequined with stars. I remarked on its beauty to Adela, thinking I might distract her from her plans.

“You talk too much, Mr. Rawlins.”

“One of these days I guess I’ll get myself into trouble.” She didn’t find that funny.

“We need someplace quiet,” she said.

“This is Swing Street,” Mr. Quantrill said. “It doesn’t get quiet.”

“The bars never close,” I agreed, “and there isn’t a single alley that doesn’t contain at least one drunk. We’ll need to head east.”

Mr. Quantrill wanted us away from his theater, and I wanted to postpone the moment as long as possible, in hopes that I might talk some sense into her. She did not strike me as naturally the killing type and I wondered what had happened to her to make her that way.

I suggested that we head toward Reynald Park. That was an expanse of unkempt lawn with some scraggly trees and per sis tent tent habitations on the eastern edge of Hoo Lai. Well, when we got there, there were policemen. I had guessed that there would be— I often go walking at night when I am thinking and I cannot sleep, and I had noticed that there was a police-station next to the park and a bar where the policemen drank. So we turned back.

We walked down streets of houses, lit or unlit windows, the occasional gas lamp illuminating stone steps and narrow gardens and addresses.

“You can’t duel on somebody’s doorstep,” I said. “Not without an invitation. That would be vulgar.”

Next we found ourselves near an expanse of ware houses and workhouses with the banners of the Baxter Trust on their square ugly roofs, and though the streets were empty dogs behind fences set up a racket, and the lights of nightwatchmen drifted toward us, and we drifted away.

“The cemetery,” Mr. Quantrill said, “Up on Wyte Hill— it’s a long walk but—”

“You can’t duel in a cemetery,” Adela said. “The Code forbids it.”

“Besides,” I said, “it would be bad for morale.”

You
may
duel in the vacant yard of a Smiler meeting-house, or so Adela said, the Code of the Deltas cares nothing for the Brothers of the New Thought, but there were policemen around in the street outside the meeting-house.

The policemen were going door to door down the street, waking men in nightshirts and women holding babies and asking questions. I do not know what they were looking for but they stopped and questioned us too. We said we were theater-types and that seemed sufficient to explain what we were doing wandering about aimlessly in the small hours of the morning— by that stage the sky was beginning just subtly to lighten in the west.

I was scared— I do not mean to deny that I was scared both of being shot and of shooting someone. But nor did I want to be a coward in anyone’s eyes, least of all my own. I asked Amaryllis if she would take word, if I was shot, to my sisters, and she asked what sisters, and I had to say, well, forget it, and that it did not matter.

We headed toward the river. There were more policemen in the streets. It seemed there were more than was usual. I did not know what to expect in the way of policing from a town like Jasper, but Mr. Quantrill did and he also seemed discomforted. He wondered whether maybe another Senator had been assassinated, or an Agent spotted in town.

The omnipresence of policemen began to frustrate me and unnerve me, so that I almost forgot that the policemen were the only thing between me and the duel. Amaryllis speculated jokingly that maybe the notorious John Creedmoor or Harry Ransom themselves had been spotted in Jasper City. Amaryllis had been drinking, too. One of the stagehands suggested that maybe they were experimenting with their secret weapon in a basement somewhere and were about to blow up the whole damn city if the cops didn’t catch them in time. The other stagehand said that wasn’t funny.

When I say
policemen,
I mean that some of them were policemen, and some I think were members of the Jasper City militia, you could tell because they wore different uniforms, and carried rifles not handguns, and had a different kind of dully gleaming copper badge. Some of them wore no uniform at all, or no uniform any of us could recognize.

I guess you could call this a portrait of Adela. It’s what she told me about herself, anyhow.

A Portrait of Adela

“It’s an extraordinary creation,” I said. “The piano, I mean. How did you come to—?”

She shook her head. “It’s a toy.”

“You’d shoot a man over a toy?”

“It’s a question of principle, Mr. Rawlins. It’s the last thing I have left.”

“I know that feeling, Miss Adela, I know that feeling well. I am a kind of entrepreneur and inventor and traveler myself, and I know what it’s like to be down. I’m from a town called Hamlin. You sound like you’re up from the Deltas.”

“You know that’s true, Mr. Rawlins. Why do you care to ask? What business is it of yours to interrogate—?”

“I’d like to know where the piano came from. It was just about the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen— maybe the second after some work of my own— and I don’t get many chances to talk to anybody who understands about that kind of work. Anyhow I’d like to know who’s about to shoot who.”

“My name is Adela Kotan Iermo. I am the third daughter and the fifth child of the sixth Baron of Iermo. I was taught to shoot by one of my father’s retainers. He did not want to teach a girl to shoot but my money was good. Have no doubt about who will be shooting whom, Mr. Rawlins. Because you apologized I will aim for the leg— the Code permits that mercy.”

“Well that’s a fine offer— I’ll try to do likewise but I make no promises. Put a gun in my hand and just about anything might happen. Nobody ever taught me to shoot unless you count my sister Jess and that was only throwing stones at cats. My father had no retainers nor money. What’s Iermo like? I’ve never been to the Deltas.”

“It’s the seventh or the eighth wealthiest of the Baronies. It produces sugar and rice; my father or my brothers could tell you the tonnage, the revenues, the number of retainers and field-hands and men-at-arms—I don’t know— I have been away for a long time, Mr. Rawlins, and things change fast these days. Do you want to hear about the sunsets or the dances or the rainy season or the sounds and smells of the jungle?”

“Oh,” Amaryllis interrupted, “The
jungles
— is it true that—?”

Adela ignored her.

I said, “What does
Kotan
mean? It sounds like a Folk word.” She shrugged. “It’s a name. I have others— Adela Kotan Mor Chatillon Iermo and so on— each one a family of some small note and wealth in the Deltas— Kotan is named for some ruins. Now let me ask you a question, Mr. Rawlins— why did you lie about the piano? Was it pride? You had to have something to boast about and you did not care if it was yours or not— I’ve known many men like that.”

“It was a misunderstanding. My own accomplishments are plenty noteworthy, ma’am, as a matter of fact. I have lived by my wits since I was a child. I built my own electrical engine at the age of fourteen—”

“Well so did I, Mr. Rawlins.”

We traded boasts like that for a while, as we walked down toward the river. Some of the stink of the yards was in the air. I learned about her youthful investigations into electricity, magnetism, musicology, and logic. I told her about some of my own exploits, suitably disguised. I learned about the peculiar arrangement that governed her peculiar childhood, which was this. As is the custom among the land-owning classes of the Deltas, her father settled a trust upon her and each of her siblings. In the case of Adela Kotan Iermo the family’s lawyer— having recently contracted one of those brain-eating poxes that are fashionable in the hot & wet climate of the Deltas— committed an unpardonable drafting error, on account of which the young Adela acquired control of her fortune at the age of twelve, not twenty-one.

She was future-minded. She hired tutors, some from as far afield as Gibson City or Jasper. She learned mathematics, logic, music— of these only music was a fitting activity for a princess of the Deltas. When she began to learn mechanics and electrical engineering her father threatened to disown her. She caused a new house to be constructed for herself down beyond the fields at the edge of the floodplain— she was fifteen years old. She hired servants. Her father ranted and raved. Her eccentricities embarrassed the family. Her brothers tried to seize her— she hired guards. She joined the Liberationists and she purchased and freed Folk in order to spite her father, and she attempted to learn their language because it could not be done. She conducted a precocious correspondence with the professors in Jasper City and Gibson, and unlike when I wrote to them she got a reply. She conducted experiments with magnetism and electricity. All of this sounded like just the life of freedom and greatness I had dreamed of back in East Conlan but Adela was unhappy about it, and I thought as I guess everybody sometimes does about how big and strange the world is. I told her about my vision of Light and she told me about her vision of the coming century, which was Automation. She said that in the century to come there would be no fields of toiling laborers— there would be leisure for all— there would be steam-power and clockwork. That tiny woman had row upon row of big mechanical men constructed, all stooping and cutting in unison. She made a kind of life. Nature does this sort of thing so easily the world is over-supplied with bugs and beetles that do just about nothing but move mindlessly and she did not see why human ingenuity should not do at least as well. Rust, balance, weeds, all gave her trouble. I imagine the mud-plain outside her house filling up with ranks of half-finished metal men who when the plain flooded looked like the victims of the kind of disaster that gets written about in the newspapers as far away as Jasper. It is possible in this way to burn through most of the fortune of a princess of the Deltas in less than ten years.